A method of forming a multi-user online collaboration includes automatically receiving and processing a plurality of communications, including comparing the plurality of communications with collaboration launch criteria. When a received communication meets the collaboration launch criteria, a participant in the communication is invited to generate a multi-user online collaboration. In some embodiments, the method includes identifying a group of communications, comparing the group of communications with the collaboration launch criteria to produce a comparison result, and generating a collaborative metric in accordance with the comparison result.